How your valuable content calendar will help

A content calendar is a vital content marketing planning tool that your whole team can share, helping everyone to see what content is coming up, what it’s for and how it’s going to pan out in the months ahead.

A content calendar is not your content strategy (the strategic content thinking should come first) but it’s a simple and practical way of putting your strategy into action. It turns good ideas into well-targeted, relevant content aligned with your business goals.

How to fill in your valuable content calendar

Here’s a bit of guidance for filling in each section of your calendar.

Publish date – obvious but important. When will you get it out there?

Writer – who is responsible for its completion? Commit resource.

Content format and destination – will it be a blog, a video, a printed mailer, newsletter, infographic or even a talk? And where will you post it – on your blog? A guest article on someone else’s site? Or even another site like Medium or LinkedIn perhaps?

Working title – this may evolve as you write but try out a good positioning headline here.

Target keyword or concept – What challenge are you looking to solve for your reader with this content? What subject are you focusing on? Think of real people AND search engines if you want to give the content the best chance of being found. What words/phrase would they use? Include these in your title and through the content.

Target audience – who are you talking to with this piece of content? Be specific. Have a clear picture of who you are creating this is for and what they need if you want your content to hit home.

Goal – why are you creating this? What do you want this content to achieve for your business. Probably the most important question of all.

Call to action – a crucial step if you’re looking for results. What’s the desired action you really want from the reader?

Status – planned or in motion? Track how you’re doing on the road to completion.

Results – well, was it worth it? Measure and record the results here. Then you’ll know what works best and what it makes sense to repeat.